


Percentages

by engmaresh



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Character Study, Complicated Relationships, F/M, Family, Father-Son Relationship, Light Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:46:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22862728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engmaresh/pseuds/engmaresh
Summary: The night before leaving Zaofu, Baatar has one final conversation with his father.
Relationships: Baatar Jr. & Baatar Sr., Baatar Jr./Kuvira (Avatar)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 51





	Percentages

**Author's Note:**

> Writen for Baatar Jr Weekend, for the prompt _family_.

At first Baatar thinks he’s dreaming, but the knocking continues, insistent. Slowly, by degrees, he drifts into wakefulness. The knock comes one last time, then silence

Baatar rolls over. There she is. Kuvira, breathing deeply and evenly, curled into the wall, covers pushed down to the waist. She’s so beautiful it hurts. What he'd give for this final night of peace with her in Zaofu to never end, except that he remembers that stupid knock on the door, and quickly looks away. Untucks the blanket from under her and pulls it up to her neck, then on second thought over her head. Gently arranges a pillow over that too, not to smother, but to hide. Then he quickly rises from the bed, pulling on the first pair of trousers he finds.

When he opens the door, inch by inch, there’s no one there, but he spots the back of his father’s head over the couch. Softly closing the door behind him, he walks over to join his father. “What is it, dad?” he asks. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“She’s in your room, isn’t she?”

“What?” Baatar’s voice cracks in his panic. “No!”

Baatar Sr sighs deeply, pulling off his glasses to polish them on the hem of his robe. Despite the hour, he’s still dressed in his day clothes. Baatar notes the smudges of graphite on his hands. His father has been working late again.

“Lie better, son,” Senior says bluntly. He puts his glasses back on and gives Baatar a severe look over them. “You’re a grown man, so I won’t tell you who you should sleep with but—”

“What are you doing here?” Baatar interrupts. 

“Come,” he father says, and while his voice is quiet, when he puts his arm around Baatar’s shoulder, his grip is iron. “Walk with me.”

“But—”

“Baatar.” Senior’s voice brooks no argument and so Baatar allows himself to be guided from his rooms, out into the corridor. They walk in silence until they pass the last of the bedrooms, Huan’s, then Baatar pulls himself from his father’s grip and turns to him.

“What is this?” he hisses. “Did mom put you up to this?”

His father sighs again. The lights have been dimmed, casting half his face in shadow, and Baatar realises for the first time in a while that his father is _old_. The fine lines gathering on his brow and in the corners of his eyes and mouth seem to have multiplied in the past months. Grey hair Baatar doesn’t recall seeing now falls into his face. He’s struck by the thought that this is also _his_ face. What he will look like when he’s his father’s age. If he lives that long.

“I’m not doing this because your mother asked me to,” his father is saying. “Do you think I disagree with your plan just because she does?”

“If she couldn’t change my mind,” Baatar insists stubbornly, “what makes you think you can?”

“I just want to _talk_ , Junior,” says his father, his tone sharpening. Baatar decides to shut up. His father is slow to anger, his temper hard to provoke, but if anything, the events of the past few weeks would be exactly the right thing to set him off.

“Okay,” he says, and they resume their walk down the quiet hallways. The entrances that would usually be manned by guards stand empty tonight, evidence of the tension between his mother and her security forces. There’s an internal courtyard opening up beyond the living quarters, and it’s there where his father leads him to—the tiny fountain, the craggy saga tree, the unkempt lawn. This is his father’s place, which even his mother’s love for order cannot touch.

Baatar’s toes curl in the cool grass. His father has already seated himself under the tree, heedless of the damp that must be seeping into his robes. Reluctantly, Baatar squats down next to him, picks at the blades of grass that poke up between his toes.

When he looks to his father, he is staring up at the dome. Metal gleams down at them, lit softly by small lights on the edges of each petal. It’s never fully dark in Zaofu. Baatar, having grown up with them, is used to the constant illumination. But he knows his father sleeps with the curtains drawn. 

His grandmother hates the domes, and if Zaofu’s citizens have one complaint, it’s their lack of sky. But as his mother likes to say in response to that, some things require sacrifice. The night sky is a small price to pay for security. But he does wonder sometimes, as he does now, if his father regrets his greatest creation. If he misses the stars.

After several more moments, just as Baatar is beginning to wonder if all they’re going to do is stare at the dome, Senior speaks. “You know,” he begins slowly, “my parents—your grandparents—didn’t like it when I married your mother. They thought she was too wild for me, that our differences would eventually pull us apart, and they thought it better if they headed off my heartbreak at the pass. Of course it didn’t work, and I married Su anyway.

“They visited Zaofu once. They actually came to see you; you were only a few months old. Their first grandchild. At that time, Su and I had just completed two domes, the downtown sector and the industrial one, and while they were very impressed, they believed that Zaofu was...not right for me.”

“But you stayed anyway.”

“I came from a small mountain village. I was my parents' only child. They’d already been reluctant to let me study in Ba Sing Se, but to find out that I was moving to the other side of the Earth Kingdom, with no intention of returning home? I don’t think my mother ever quite forgave me for that.”

Baatar looks at his father in surprise. He doesn’t remember much of his paternal grandparents. His grandmother had died when he was five, and in truth his most vivid memory of her is actually that of his father, breaking down at her funeral. It had terrified him at the time, to see Senior, usually so calm and unruffled, fall to his knees as they’d consigned her body to the flames, tears running unchecked down his face.

He knows that Senior had invited his parents countless times to move to Zaofu. But they’d never accepted. Both his grandparents are buried in their mountain village, and every other year, his father travels there on Tomb Sweeping Day to pay his respects.

And maybe pray for their forgiveness.

He picks up a saga seed from the ground, round, red and shiny, as large as the nail on his pinky, and flicks it into the fountain.

“Do you regret it?”

“I love your mother very much,” his father says.

It’s not an answer, but Baatar doesn’t point that out. He knows what his father is trying to tell him.

He’s still missing the point. _Everyone_ is still missing the point. He’s only forty percent doing this for Kuvira. Maybe forty-five percent. The additional five because he’s not _blind_ —she’s beautiful and she likes _him_ , even when he’s being shy, and awkward, and stupid. And he’s not _dead_ either, the few times they’ve had sex have been really, really great, not that he’s had all that much experience with girls, but the way everyone’s been acting, it’s like she’d just sashayed over to him and crooked her finger sexily, when it had really just been a lot of...organising. Organising people together, finding funding and gathering information, the occasional impassioned discussions, and one day one of those discussions had gotten impassioned all the way into a storage closet, and well. Funny how things happened sometimes. Two years ago he wouldn’t have given her the time of day, not after that time she’d arrested him anyway.

But when his father asks him, “Do you love her? Kuvira?” Baatar just says, “Yes.”

Because, in the end, it’s still true.

“Do you love her cause?”

Now that’s a little less true. Maybe ten percent. Give or take a few decimals. He’d never cared much for politics, and to be honest, it would just be...easier. To do nothing. Baatar knows his mother isn’t sitting out the crisis because it’s _easier_ , but it’s still one thing less to take responsibility for. Some million people fewer to take responsibility for. Baatar honestly doesn’t care for that responsibility; leadership really isn’t his thing, he’s not all that good with people. It’s just so much less complicated to work quietly in the background, and actually get things _done_ instead of talking about it.

“She’s a lot like your mother, that girl,” his father is saying, “and I think that’s why Su’s taking this so hard. Son, if you want to leave, I won’t stop you. But you shouldn’t be making this decision for someone else. Make it for yourself.”

He is. Forty-five to fifty percent for himself. He needs to get out of here. Zaofu is safe, Zaofu is structured, and Baatar is done with safe and structured cities, done with his safe and structured life. Maybe his parents shouldn’t have allowed him to go off for that semester to Ba Sing Se. The capital had been hot and dirty, a jumbled, haphazard mess even moving further inward to the center. Crumbling shacks from scavenged materials giving way to mansions with no set architectural form, just whatever money can buy. Zaofu, meanwhile, had been built entirely based on his parents' ideas, their blueprints for a utopia. In Ba Sing Se, everyone, from the Empress to the poorest beggar, by whatever means they had, they got to do it _their_ way. _Their_ palace, _their_ mansion, _their_ shack, _their_ corner.

Baatar wants that, more than anything else. For something to be _his_. His idea, his blueprints, his creation, his possession. Now he potentially has an entire country at his disposal. Those millions of people that his mother thinks can take care of themselves. She thinks they’ll figure it out eventually, the way she did. But _he_ can help them. There’s just so much potential, he just needs to get out there.

“Please be safe.”

“I will, dad, I promise.” He reaches out, tentatively, to pat his father on the shoulder, before rising to his feet. His knees crack, legs tingling as blood rushes to his feet.

“Wait,” Senior says, as he gets up too. “When you go...your mother will be angry. She might say things she doesn’t truly mean. And if she does, don’t—” he breaks off here and now Baatar _really_ wants to leave, crawl back into bed with Kuvira if she hasn’t snuck out already, pull the blankets over his head and hide from his family until morning. Civil unrest? War? He’d rather take that over seeing his father cry again. Cry for _him_.

“I’ll be _fine_ —”

“You can come back. Anytime. You and Kuvira.” Spirits, he hates the desperation in his father’s voice. “You can come back.”

“Yes, dad,” he says. Gives him a hug, even though he’s afraid his father won’t let go. He thinks of his grandparents in their graves, far away from their only son. Where will Kuvira bury him if he dies? “I’ll come back.”

That’s one hundred percent true. He will, one day. But only after he has everything he wants.

**Author's Note:**

> Baatar's a selfish bitch, but by god, I love him.


End file.
